Owen McDonnell and Barry Simner on Single-Handed: interview

Corruption, incest and murder – a new crime drama digs into the dark side of
rural Ireland.

From Midsomer Murders via Hamish Macbeth and Heartbeat, police shows do love a good backdrop. Few directors, or viewers, can resist the lure of a Land Rover – it generally is a Land Rover – tootling away down a country lane in between jostling hillocks and pastures green. Invariably there’s the most mystifying of murders or a cat stuck in a tree, and then it’s back to the landscape shots.

On the face of it, therefore, ITV’s three-parter Single-Handed (which begins this Sunday) fits squarely in to the tradition – it tells the story of a sergeant in the Garda, Jack Driscoll (Owen McDonnell), who has taken over the policing from his father of a vast patch of the Irish Republic, from Galway City in the south to Killary harbour in the north.

Single-Handed was filmed entirely on location in Connemara, and the stunning setting is inseparable from the story. Yet if it sounds like Ballykissangel with uniforms, be advised: its writer is Barry Simner, the man who co-wrote the award-winning, knuckle-hard ITV police drama The Vice. He is not a man for chocolate-box television.

‘We gave a strong note at the very beginning – we did not want to make this Ballykissangel,’ he says. ‘I think the producers and I always had an idea that it would be nice to do a show set in a big landscape, a rural setting, but make it as gritty and tough as The Vice had been. We all liked the countryside but we hated the kind of soft-centred dramas that you usually get: Heartbeat territory.’

Single-Handed, it is safe to say, is not soft-centred. In fact it’s more like biting into an apple only to find there’s a worm in it. The set-up is modern-day Western – a new sheriff in a two-bit town, learning the hard way how folk round here do things – but it descends gradually from an inquiry into a solitary suicide to a tale of corruption, prostitution and incest. By the end of only the first episode Jack Driscoll has been betrayed by just about everyone, and everything, he knew. It is a bleak tale worthy of a bleak setting.

Barry Simner lives in North Wales, an area that is visually, if not culturally, similar to Connemara. ‘I’d met a police officer who’d worked up here in North Wales and I remember asking him how many detectives in this huge area were on duty in the middle of the night,’ he recalls. ‘He said that actually sometimes there’s only one guy on.

I thought the idea of one person operating alone, without any of the kind of backup that modern police forces have access to might be an interesting one.’

Simner shifted his focus across the Irish Sea because Ireland was more remote. ‘It was a much better fit,’ he says. ‘I met a member of the Garda out there and I asked him what he did if he was out on his own at two in the morning, miles from anywhere, no armed backup, unarmed, dealing with an armed man. And he said, “Well, you talk.” I thought that’s a gift for a dramatist.’

Simner wanted to tell the story of an isolated, insular community, where corruption is disguised as favours among friends and keeping things quiet makes them go away. His Ireland is not a place of sweetness and light, and so both he and director Colm McCarthy insisted that the landscape would not be fetishised.

‘We deliberately brought the colour down to make it duller because every time you point the camera at something it looks stunning,’ he says. ‘I think it’s quite nice, metaphorically, to show the rubbish heap in front of the beautiful landscape.’

Whereas shows such as Ballykissangel and Hamish Macbeth have drummed up many a tourist dollar for the places where they were shot, County Galway probably won’t need to build more hotels after Single-Handed. ‘Even with the interiors you feel this lowering landscape outside and that sense of the Atlantic always there, just across the fields,’ says Simner, with some pride. ‘You don’t want to live there, do you? It’s grim.’

It’s Owen McDonnell’s Jack Driscoll that has to endure this encroaching grimness. The first episode of Single-Handed, which was made by Irish broadcaster RTE, was screened in Ireland in 2007. During the making, McDonnell, 34, a newcomer to UK television although a stalwart of the Irish theatre scene, experienced the isolation of a small-town community first-hand.

‘We filmed in Tully Cross, right in the northern tip of County Galway, Connemara,’ he says. ‘It basically survives on tourism with a bit of farming and fishing. It is beautiful, but it’s a tough place to live. It rains 200 days a year. We finished filming in October and they were saying, “Right, that’s it, we’ll just batten down the hatches until Christmas.”’

He says that the villagers probably weren’t aware how Single-Handed would portray their home. ‘I think when we were filming the first one they thought it was just a new take on BallyK. But after they saw it I got lots of messages saying they enjoyed it.’

He also got a bit of criticism. ‘People were upset that I’d said in interviews there might be problems with depression and alcoholism in the local area,’ says McDonnell. ‘They didn’t appreciate that. But there is. It’s a fact of life – just because these people don’t live in the city doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be problems, particularly with the young. The local nightclub is 25 miles away. The nearest university is 50 miles away. A lot of people leave because it’s tough. But that’s exactly what I thought was interesting about the script – it didn’t shy away from any of that.’